Ten years ago, I had the fortune of meeting a Yaqui Indian from North-western Mexico. I call him “don Juan.” In Spanish, don is an appellative used to denote respect. I made don Juan’s acquaintance under the most fortuitous circumstances. I was sitting with Bill, a friend of mine, in a bus depot in a border town in Arizona. We were very quiet. In the late afternoon the summer heat seemed unbearable. Suddenly he leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder.
“There’s the man I told you about,” he said in a low voice.
He nodded casually towards the entrance. An old man had just walked in.
“What did you tell me about him?” I asked.
“He’s the Indian that knows about peyote. Remember?”
I remembered that Bill and I had once driven all day looking for the house of an “eccentric” Mexican Indian who lived in the area. We did not find the man’s house and I had the feeling that the Indians whom we had asked for directions had deliberately misled us. Bill had told me that the man was a “yerbero,” a person who gathers and sells medicinal herbs, and that he knew a great deal about the hallucinogenic cactus, peyote. He had also said that it would be worth my while to meet him. Bill was my guide in the Southwest while I was collecting information and specimens of medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area.
Bill got up and went to greet the man. The Indian was of medium height. His hair was white and short, and grew a bit over his ears, accentuating the roundness of his head. He was very dark; the deep wrinkles on his face gave him the appearance of age, yet his body seemed to be strong and fit. He moved around with a nimbleness that I would have thought impossible for an old man.
Bill signalled me to join them.
“He’s a nice guy,” Bill said to me. “But I can’t understand him. His Spanish is weird, full of rural colloquialisms, I suppose.”
The old man looked at Bill and smiled. And Bill, who speaks only a few words of Spanish, made up an absurd phrase in that language. He looked at me as if asking whether he was making sense, but I did not know what he had had in mind; he then smiled shyly and walked away. The old man looked at me and began laughing. I explained to him that my friend sometimes forgot that he did not speak Spanish.
[Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan, Simon & Schuster (1971), p. 7.]
For anyone who has read the books by Carlos Castaneda, the character “Bill,” first mentioned by name in Castaneda’s second book, A Separate Reality (quoted above), will be very familiar. According to the author, Bill was the friend who had introduced him to the Mexican Indian sorcerer Juan Matus at the Greyhound Bus station in Nogales, Arizona. As iconic as this purported first meeting between the student of anthropology, Carlos Castaneda, and the Indian sorcerer, don Juan, has become, there is good reason to suspect that the meeting did not actually take place—at least, not in the place and manner that is described by the author of The Teachings of Don Juan, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, etc. Taking into account Castaneda’s propensity for creative writing—certainly a propensity that is unbecoming a social scientist—we may suspect that Bill is a fictional character, but this does not mean that he was not modelled on a real person. A more intimate portrait of the character Bill is given in Castaneda’s final book, The Active Side of Infinity, which was published posthumously in 1998:
I decided to fly back to Los Angeles, but another anthropologist friend of mine let me know then that he was going to drive throughout Arizona and New Mexico, visiting all the places where he had done work in the past, renewing in this fashion his relationships with the people who had been his anthropological informants. “You’re welcome to come with me,” he said. “I’m not going to do any work. I’m just going to visit with them, have a few drinks with them, bullshit with them. I bought gifts for them-blankets, booze, jackets, ammunition for twenty-two-caliber rifles. My car is loaded with goodies. I usually drive alone whenever I go to see them, but by myself I always run the risk of falling asleep. You could keep me company, keep me from dozing off, or drive a little bit if I’m too drunk.”
Come with me and see how you like the Southwest.” He put his arm around my shoulders. I couldn’t help noticing how immensely heavy his arm was. He was tall and husky, but in recent years his body had acquired a strange rigidity. He had lost his boyish quality. His round face was no longer filled, youthful, the way it had been. Now it was a worried face. I believed that he worried because he was losing his hair, but at times it seemed to me that it was something more than that. And it wasn’t that he was fatter; his body was heavy in ways that were impossible to explain. I noticed it in the way that he walked, and got up, and sat down. Bill seemed to me to be fighting gravity with every fiber of his being, in everything he did. Disregarding my feelings of defeat, I started on a journey with him. We visited every place in Arizona and New Mexico where there were Indians. One of the end results of this trip was that I found out that my anthropologist friend had two definite facets to his person. He explained to me that his opinions as a professional anthropologist were very measured, and congruous with the anthropological thought of the day, but that as a private person, his anthropological fieldwork had given him a wealth of experiences that he never talked about. These experiences were not congruous with the anthropological thought of the day because they were events that were impossible to catalog. During the course of our trip, he would invariably have some drinks with his ex-informants, and feel very relaxed afterward. I would take the wheel then and drive as he sat in the passenger seat taking sips from his bottle of thirty-year-old Ballantine’s.
When the journey ended, Bill drove me to the Greyhound bus depot in Nogales, Arizona, for my return trip to Los Angeles. As we were sitting in the waiting area before the bus came, he consoled me in a paternal manner, reminding me that failures were a matter of course in anthropological fieldwork, and that they meant only the hardening of one’s purpose or the coming to maturity of an anthropologist. Abruptly, he leaned over and pointed with a slight movement of his chin to the other side of the room. “I think that old man sitting on the bench by the corner over there is the man I told you about,” he whispered in my ear. “I am not quite sure because I’ve had him in front of me, face-to face, only once.”
A strange anxiety suddenly possessed me and made me jump out of my seat. As if I had no volition of my own, I approached the old man and immediately began a long tirade on how much I knew about medicinal plants and shamanism among the American Indians of the plains and their Siberian ancestors. As a secondary theme, I mentioned to the old man that I knew that he was a shaman. I concluded by assuring him that it would be thoroughly beneficial for him to talk to me at length. “If nothing else,” I said petulantly, “we could swap stories. You tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine.” The old man kept his eyes lowered until the last moment. Then he peered at me. “I am Juan Matus,” he said, looking me squarely in the eyes. My tirade shouldn’t have ended by any means, but for no reason that I could discern I felt that there was nothing more I could have said. I wanted to tell him my name. He raised his hand to the height of my lips as if to prevent me from saying it. At that instant, a bus pulled up to the bus stop. The old man muttered that it was the bus he had to take, then he earnestly asked me to look him up so we could talk with more ease and swap stories. There was an ironic smirk on the comer of his mouth when he said that. With an incredible agility for a man his age—I figured he must have been in his eighties—he covered, in a few leaps, the fifty yards between the bench where he was sitting and the door of the bus. As if the bus had stopped just to pick him up, it moved away as soon as he had jumped in and the door had closed.
“Who do you think could give me some information about where he might live?” I asked him. “Perhaps some people in Yuma,” he replied, a bit more relaxed. “Maybe the people I introduced you to at the beginning of our trip. You wouldn’t lose anything by asking them. Tell them that I sent you to them.” I changed my plans right then and instead of going back to Los Angeles went directly to Yuma, Arizona. I saw the people to whom Bill had introduced me. They didn’t know where the old Indian lived, but their comments about him inflamed my curiosity even more. They said that he was not from Yuma, but from Sonora, Mexico, and that in his youth he had been a fearsome sorcerer who did incantations and put spells on people, but that he had mellowed with age, turning into an ascetic hermit.
[Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, HarperCollins (1998), selections from pages 32-39.]
The only reasonably well-known person, active in the discipline of anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s,that I have been able to find, who closely fits Castaneda’s description of “Bill” is William Madsen (1920-2003), who was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1966 until his retirement in 1991:
Professor William “Bill” Madsen was already a much-published and well-recognized specialist in Mexican society and religious practices when he joined the Department of Anthropology in 1966. His first book, The Virgin’s Children: Life in an Aztec Village Today (1960), was based on two years of fieldwork in Mexico, the starting point of his lifetime interest in Mexican culture and religion. Professor Charles Erasmus was chair of the department at the time Bill was hired, and the year 1966 was the lead edge of a short, but very successful period of departmental expansion that led to the young department being judged one of the top departments in the United States by the 1980s.
Two years before joining the department, Bill had published his best-selling Mexican-Americans of South Texas (1964) in the influential Holt, Rinehart and Winston series, and in the process pioneered “border” studies, a research field of considerable interest today. A few years later he published The American Alcoholic (Charles C. Thomas, 1974).
Bill was always an immensely popular teacher, almost a cult figure among undergraduates. It was well known in the department that whatever class he taught would fill Campbell Hall. For many years he taught the department’s introductory course to cultural anthropology, a class on the anthropology of religion, and then later a class on substance abuse, each greatly popular among students and closely tied to his own research interests. Less well known to his colleagues, Bill was in demand as a public speaker in the community as well.
Bill’s own life had the aura of storybook. He was born in Shanghai and grew up in Manila, the Philippines. And during World War II he served with the American Field Service attached to Tahitian Free French Troops and the British Eighth Army in North Africa. He married Claudia, his wife of 56 years in Santa Barbara in 1946. He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1955. He is survived by his wife and two children.
[https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/inmemoriam/html/williammadsen.htm]
If the character Bill was a real person, I suggest that “Bill” Madsen might have been this person. If, on the other hand, Bill was essentially a fictional character, which is by far the more likely of these two possibilities, then I would like to assert that this character was modelled on a real person: Professor William Madsen. In his book, The Active Side of Infinity, Castaneda makes it seem like he has known his friend for years, which is very unlikely. During an interview for Psychology Today magazine in 1972, Castaneda told editor Sam Keen that he “was in a bus depot in Arizona with a high-school friend of mine” when this companion pointed out an old Indian to him and said the Indian knew about peyote and medicinal plants. The problem is: Castaneda had never attended Hollywood High School in Los Angeles as he claimed—nor any other high school in the U.S. for that matter. His high-school friend would have had to have been from Peru.
Castaneda had completed two semesters at UCLA when he purportedly first met don Juan at the bus terminal in Nogales, Arizona during the summer of 1960. While Castaneda was studying at UCLA, William Madsen was affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin, carrying out fieldwork from 1957 to 1961 among Mexican Americans in Texas, fieldwork which would result in the controversial book Mexican-Americans in South Texas (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964). It seems to me unlikely that Madsen would have had the time in 1960 to be driving “throughout Arizona and New Mexico, visiting all the places where he had done work in the past, renewing in this fashion his relationships with the people who had been his anthropological informants.” But, of course, it is possible—barely; however, the assertion by Castaneda that his friend had very little knowledge of the Spanish language would seem to rule out the possibility that Madsen himself had been Castaneda’s purported guide in 1960. The real William Madsen spoke Spanish to perfection, not to mention Nahuatl. (Apparently, Castaneda did not learn even the simplest polite phrases in Yaqui in all the time he spent in the Yaqui towns of Sonora.) Moreover, I have not been able to find a photograph of William Madsen; thus, I cannot say for sure if he had been “tall, husky, and balding” in 1960. According to Castaneda’s fifth book, The Second Ring of Power, Carlos had been brought to don Juan “by a man he had never seen before in his life.” Don Juan had seen “that the man’s death was hovering above his head, and he found it very odd that the man would point [Carlos] out to him at such a time.” According to The Active Side of Infinity, Bill died at some point before 1973 (i.e., while don Juan was still living). In eulogy, don Juan says of Carlos’ old friend: “Your anthropologist friend talked to me once. I remembered him so clearly that I wasn’t surprised at all when he brought you to me at that bus depot. [And we readers thought that don Juan had never before in his life seen the man!] I couldn’t help him when he talked to me. He wasn’t the man I was looking for, but I wished him well from my sorcerer’s emptiness, from my sorcerer’s silence. For this reason, I know that on his last trip, he was saying thank you to the people who counted in his life.” William Madsen, as a matter of fact, outlived Castaneda by five years.
Did Castaneda run into some other person in Tucson, Arizona, who offered up his services as a “guide in the Southwest while [he] was collecting information and specimens of medicinal plants used by the Indians of the area,” but afterwards remodelled this person after William Madsen for his later books.Again, it is possible—or even probable. I would suggest, however, that Castaneda first met—or, at least, first saw—William Madsen after Madsen had become affiliated to the University of California in 1966 as professor of cultural anthropology. The purported guide is not mentioned by name in Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which was published in 1968. Bill does not get his name until the publication of A Separate Reality in 1971. Was Bill Madsen Carlos Castaneda’s guide during the summer of 1960, or was he just the template for a fictional character without ever having become aware of it? Be this as it may, I have little doubt that Castaneda had read, and was profoundly influenced by Madsen’s book, The Virgin’s Children, during his first two semesters at UCLA. This book was, and still is, a defining study in cultural anthropology:
An absorbing account of the descendants of the ancient Aztecs and of the survival of their culture into the twentieth century in the Valley of Mexico is presented in this fascinating volume. Focusing on San Francisco Tecospa—a village of some eight hundred Indians who still spoke Nahuatl, whose lives were dominated by supernaturalism, and who observed with only slight modification much of their Aztec heritage—this story bears out the anthropological principle that innovations are most likely to be accepted when they are useful, communicable, and compatible with established tradition.
Nowhere is the Indian genius for combining the old and the new better exemplified than in the story of how the Virgin of Guadalupe came to fulfill the role formerly played by the pagan goddess Tonantzin and of how Christian saints replaced the Aztec gods. At the time of this study, the Tecospans still called the Catholic Virgin Tonantzin, but their concept of the mother goddess had changed profoundly since Aztec times.
Tonantzin the Pagan, a hideous goddess with claws on her hands and feet and with snakes entwining her face, wore a necklace of hearts, hands, and skulls to represent her insatiable appetite for corpses. Tonantzin the Catholic—also called Guadalupe—is a beautiful and benevolent mother deity who repeatedly stays God’s anger against her Mexican children and answers the prayers of the poorest Indian, with no thought of return.
In Tecospa the road to social recognition lay in the performance of religious works, and the neglect of ritual obligation subjected both the individual and the community to the anger of supernaturals who punished with illness or other misfortune. Religion was inextricably a part of every phase of life, and it is the whole life of the Aztecan that is recorded here: fiesta, clothing, food, agricultural practices, courtship, marriage, pregnancy and childbirth, death, witchcraft and its cures, medical practices and attitudes, houses and home life, ethics, and the hot-cold complex that classifies everything in the Tecospan universe from God to Bromo-Seltzer.
With a marked simplicity of style and language William Madsen has produced a profoundly significant anthropological study that is delightful reading from the first sentence to the last. The drawings, the work of a ten-year-old Tecospan lad, are remarkable for their penetrating insight into the culture. [https://utpress.utexas.edu/9780292741348/ William Madsen’s book, The Virgin’s Children, which otherwise appears to be out of print, can be purchased via this website.]
In my opinion, William Madsen was at least three times the author that Carlos Castaneda would ever be—and ten times the anthropologist. Madsen met his own “don Juan” in 1952, eight years before Carlos Castaneda met his “don Juan.” The name of this brujo was “don Mario,” a brujo who, undeservedly, is infinitely less famous than Castaneda’s “don Juan:”
NEARLY everybody knows about the ancient Aztecs, but the story of their cultural survival in the Valley of Mexico today has never been published in English. Barely twenty minutes’ driving time south of Xochimilco is a group of Nahuatl Indian villages whose inhabitants speak the Aztec language and observe many customs of their Aztec forefathers.
Anthropologists have long recognized the need for information about the modern descendants of the Aztecs. In 1952 the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research sent me to the Valley of Mexico to study a Nahuatl Indian village. This book is the result of my sixteen-month field study in the village of San Francisco Tecospa and the exploration of historical documents on the Valley of Mexico.
When I arrived in Mexico City I asked my former teacher, Professor Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, of Mexico’s National School of Anthropology, to help me find a suitable village for the study. We visited the towns bordering the southern shore of Lake Xochimilco and the famous floating gardens. From Xochimilco we drove south to Milpa Alta, where we struck up a conversation with a local carpenter who told us about the surrounding villages. Before the Spanish conquest of Mexico the nine villages in the district of Milpa Alta constituted the little kingdom of Malacachtepec Momoxco, ruled by Aztec noblemen. Our Milpa Alta friend said that San Francisco Tecospa was one of the oldest and smallest villages in the district, and he offered to take us there.
As we drove over the dirt road to Tecospa, I asked our guide whether there were any witches in the area. With marked embarrassment he admitted that he was the compadre of a Tecospa Indian known as the most notorious witch in the district. He agreed to introduce us to the witch.
I parked my station wagon near Tecospa’s old Spanish church, which stands on a knoll overlooking the village of some eight hundred Nahuatl Indians. Below us lay clusters of small stone houses, pepper trees, cornfields, and maguey plants, which yield the popular intoxicating beverage called “pulque.” We walked through cobblestone streets to the witch’s home. His household enclosure included his own living quarters, the house of his son’s family, a cooking shed, and a stone sweat-bath hut called a “temazcal”—the same type of dome-shaped structure the ancient Aztecs used for curing the sick.
A wizened old man wearing a straw sombrero over his closely-cropped white hair came out to greet us. The Witch was dressed in a hand-woven jacket, long white trousers, a waist sash, and sandals soled with pieces of automobile tires. His wife wore an old store dress and went barefoot. Her long, unkempt hair, wrinkled face, and squinting eyes made her look more witchlike than her husband. He gave us a cordial Mexican embrace; she grinned and extended her hand.
Our host offered us his only two chairs and borrowed two more from a neighbor. His wife sat on a rock while he leaned against the temazcal. After offering us pulque the Witch began to talk about his experiences in the Revolution. Zapatistas occupied Tecospa for a long time during the heavy fighting in these parts. The Witch said he did not take sides in the fighting because he was a peaceable man. He did not mention witchcraft, a subject veiled in secrecy by the Tecospa Indians. Before we left, the Witch pressed us to come back, his house was ours.
We continued our survey of towns, but I knew I had found the village I wanted to study. Almost untouched by modern urban culture, Tecospa retained much of its ancient Aztec heritage. Tecospans devoutly worship the Virgin of Guadalupe, whom they also call by the name Tonantzin, the Nahuatl word for “mother.” The Indians today say they are the Virgin’s children.
When I returned to Tecospa to carry out this study, Don Bernardino Meza and Doña Refugio Bracho became my wisest informants and most faithful friends. I also am indebted to Don Serafín Campos, the jovial mayor of Tecospa; the sad old man reputed to be a witch, whose name had best be omitted; Professor Cecelio Robles, the retired schoolteacher who helped me locate historical documents on Tecospa; Raul Fuentes and Ramón Alvarez, the Mexico City College students who assisted me with the field work; Sr. and Sra. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, who introduced me to the village of Tecospa. Dr. John Rowe, professor of anthropology at the University of California, guided the field work and read my material on Tecospa religion. The late Dr. Robert Redfield, of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago, read the entire manuscript and made valuable suggestions, including revisions and the addition of the last chapter. The manuscript was read for errors by Dr. Lewis Hanke, then director of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas; Dr. T. N. Campbell, chairman of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Texas; and Sr. Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, of Mexico’s National School of Anthropology. Some of the materials used in this book were earlier reported in the Southwest Journal of Anthropology, the Journal of American Folklore, and the Middle American Research Institute Publications of Tulane University. I am also indebted to the University Research Institute for a subvention to assist in the publication of this book. My last acknowledgment goes to my wife, Claudia, who aided in the field research on pregnancy and childbirth, helped revise the manuscript, and typed it.
Names have been changed in cases where my informants might be embarrassed at being identified. The only true names of Tecospans mentioned in this book are those of Serafín Campos, Bernardino Meza, Refugio Bracho, Esteban Peña, Timo Robles, Emmuel Gonzales, Amado Pérez, and Incarnación Martínez.
William Madsen
Austin, Texas
September 15, 1959
[William Madsen, The Virgin’s Children: Life in an Aztec Village Today, University of Texas Press (1960), pp. vii-ix.]
The Witch of Tecospa and I became such close friends that he called me “compadre” and invited me to be a godfather to his grandchildren, but he always denied being a witch. I did not ask him about his witchcraft, but he knew the villagers had told me of it. Tecospans say Don Mario is a nagual witch who transforms himself into a burro at night while working evil magic to sicken his victims.
He reportedly changes into animal form by rolling in ashes or by leaping over a fire twice to form a cross. Since Don Mario and his family are the only members of the community accused of witchcraft, hostile suspicion falls on them whenever anybody thinks he is bewitched.
“People say I am a witch but I am not,” Don Mario told me one day. Pointing to the sky he solemnly proclaimed, “My power comes from above and it is a power to help raise up my brothers.” He told me the story of how he obtained his power:
“When I was very, very young I lived at the Hacienda San Juan de la Labor near Laguna de Zumpango in the state of Toluca. The hacienda was owned by Señor Montiel, who was 160 years old and had to be carried in someone’s arms to his hammock for sunshine and fresh air. I would rock the old man in his hammock and he would tell me stories, because he was very wise and had lived a long time. The old man’s daughter would bring him fine food to eat in his hammock and the old man would always leave something for me to eat. He told me not to be afraid to eat the food because I would gain knowledge from it. I got my curing power by eating his leftovers.
“And then, as it was in the afternoon, the old man would hear the cattle coming home, lowing. He would say: The cattle are hungry. We’ll have to plant earlier next year. We’ll have to plant in March.’ Then he would say, ‘The little coyotes are crying, they are also hungry. I see a large white skunk. Any skunk is a bad omen but a white skunk is especially bad, he explained. This skunk stood about waist-high. The Witch followed it through the fields until it disappeared behind a maguey plant. A few days later his first wife died. He said the skunk had appeared as a prophecy of her death.
Coming to Tecospa as a young man, Don Mario earned his living by tending sheep and shearing wool at various haciendas. Twice robbers attacked him, but he possessed supernatural power to escape harm.
“People might want to kill me but none can, for I carry God in my heart,” he said. “I always carry God in my heart. When I was young I wasn’t afraid to go out at night regardless of the hour. I’d go out by a lake where you could see specks of light all around. [Specks of light come from witches transformed into balls of fire.] But I wasn’t afraid. I’d stop and put needles in the form of a cross on the four sides of my hat, wave my hat up and down, and walk on. Nothing ever happened to me.
“Once when I was going home from my humble work, carrying only the tools for wool shearing, four men stopped me and said, ‘Give us that money you are carrying!’ I replied, ‘What money? I have none.’ I turned and ran, and as I ran, I took the shears from my bundle and opened them in the form of a cross. Then I turned on these men and said, ‘Now, my God, help me against these men that would do me harm—now come on!’ These men had machetes but after four hours they were unable to hurt me. I said that if they would leave me alone I’d give them a drink. They agreed, and after drinking went on their way.
“God would rather punish my enemies than hurt me. Once I was tending 130 sheep. Several men attacked me. They struck me on the head but the blow didn’t knock me down. The men said, ‘What is this man carrying? We can do nothing to him.’ I had three leather hats on. I said, ‘Aye, Dios mío, help me against these men.’ They hit me across my nose with the butt of a gun and broke my nose, leaving this scar. Still I didn’t fall down. ‘What does this man carry?’ the men asked again. I carried God in my heart. The men stripped me and tied me with my elbows together behind me but later I escaped. Shortly afterwards all of the men who had attacked me were killed during a battle in the revolution.”
Don Mario started curing shortly after coming to Tecospa, but he soon lost his local patients because they feared he might bewitch them. He still treats out-of-town patients. When a sick person summons Don Mario, he first takes the pulse of each wrist and each ankle. Next, he places his open palm on the patient’s stomach and presses down hard, exerting pressure with his fingertips. If the patient’s belly begins to jump, Don Mario diagnoses the illness as bewitchment. To confirm this diagnosis, he sucks the patient’s belly. If witchcraft caused the illness, blood passes from the sick man’s belly into the curer’s mouth.
Tecospans estimate Don Mario has killed about fifty people through witchcraft. Several plots to murder him have been called off at the last minute because of the local belief that whoever kills a witch assumes his sins, dooming the murderer to hell for eternity. Despite this punishment people still talk about killing the Witch. One woman said she thought any man who had the courage to murder Don Mario would get to heaven someday. A number of persons have hired out-of-town witches to kill Don Mario, but whenever he is bewitched, he goes to Mexico City spiritists and they cure him.
[Madsen, The Virgin’s Children, pp. 193-196.]
How much inspiration for his own projected studies would Carlos Castaneda, first-year student of anthropology, have derived from a reading of William Madsen’s book? He would have understood that many aspects of ancient indigenous culture in Mexico had actually survived the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, albeit more or less disguised in the garbs of Christianity. He would also have noted with anticipation that the age-old occupations of the healer (curandero) and the sorcerer (brujo) had not only survived, but were probably flourishing in what was then (1950s and 1960s) present-day Mexico. All he had to do was to find an authentic Indian brujo of his own. And I believe that he actually did—exactly how he did, whether it was by chance or design, will probably always be a matter for debate.
About a year after the publication of The Teachings of Don Juan in California, William and Claudia Madsen’s (in my opinion) thoroughly delightful book, entitled A Guide to Mexican Witchcraft, was published and printed in Mexico City by Editorial Minutiae Mexicana for a series of books in the English language that appears to have mainly catered to Gringo tourists. Other books in this series are, for example: A Guide to Architecture in Ancient Mexico, A guide to Mexican Ceramics, and A Guide to Tequila, Mezcal and Pulque. These books were initially printed in editions of only 1,000 copies; thus, we may assume that the printers were not anticipating any bestsellers, and yet I feel that the Madsen’s guide to Mexican witchcraft would have deserved such a fortune. The book(let) was reprinted at least twice (1972 and 1977), but is nowadays out of print, and a pre-owned copy costs about $40, which is rather expensive for a used paperback of only ninety-four pages. For anyone interested in learning about the practice of healing and witchcraft in Mexico, forty dollars is a bargain price. First published more than half a century ago, the information in this book is not as dated as one might think. (Indeed, brujería and curanderismo are still practiced extensively in both rural and urban settings in present-day Mexico; however, the age-old problem with charlatans is a perplexing issue—more now, in the throes of the so-called “New Age,” than ever before. Charlatans are now a dime a dozen.) The authors’ intention with the book was undoubtedly a serious one, and yet there is refreshingly little academic pretence to be found within its covers. Did Carlos Castaneda, who did much of his research in the library at UCLA, read this book in 1969? I am assuming that he did.
Among the tourists in Mexico the burning question about witchcraft is: Does it work? The answer is yes, if you are a witch. Or if you are bewitched. Or if you know someone who is bewitched. But if you are a foreigner, don’t expect witchcraft to work for you. It is a well-known fact that foreigners are immune to witchcraft.
Witchcraft works wonders when it is made in Mexico by Mexicans. A mistreated wife can use it to knock off her husband or drive him insane. A jealous wife can eliminate her rivals by witchcraft. An abandoned wife can draw her philandering mate home again. The wife of a drunk can make him stop drinking.
It works for men, too. A jilted suitor can bewitch his fickle sweetheart and make her ugly so nobody will marry her. A storekeeper can hire a witch to put his competitors out of business. A farmer can acquire a coveted piece of land by bewitching others who want to buy it. A man who has been insulted can get even by using witchcraft to inflict his enemy with sickness, death, or financial failure.
Witchcraft has another function which outweighs all the rest today. It can cut people down to size when they are putting on the dog. The most likely candidate for bewitchment is the big shot. If he tries to outdo his neighbors by throwing money around on fancy clothes or a big house, he had better beware. Conspicuous consumption is not the key to social success among most Mexicans.
You make be tempted to try to find a witch during your visit to Mexico. This is not easy. Mexicans think it best not to discuss witchcraft with tourists. If you bring up the subject with a Mexican, he will almost certainly assure you he does not believe in witchcraft. He may explain that witchcraft is a superstition found only among uncivilized Indians. Perhaps he will entertain you with amusing tales of witches who lived in his community long ago, before the advent of “civilization.” Civilized people are not supposed to believe in witchcraft. “There are no more witches, here, now that we are civilized,” the visitor is told.
But you begin to see a different picture if you live in a Mexican village long enough to make friends. One day a neighbor will take you into his confidence. “I don’t believe in witchcraft, but . . .” he pauses to observe your reaction. If it appears favorable, he continues. “I have seen a case of witchcraft with my own eyes.” He relates the gory details. From then on, you are “in.” You hear about case after horrible case of bewitchment.
Still, nobody knows who the witches are. They must be from another town. Probably from one of those uncivilized Indian villages over the hill. It is dangerous to tell a foreigner that your neighbor is a witch, even when the whole town has pegged him for a witch. The foreigner might be a government spy sent to investigate witches. And the witch might find out who ratted on him.
We lived in “our village” for nearly a year before people would risk naming the witches in their own community. Not one was a primitive Indian. They all turned out to be entirely civilized. Their names have been changed in the following pages, and so have the names of the informants. We trust you will understand why.
[William and Claudia Madsen, A Guide to Mexican Witchcraft, Minutiae Mexicana (1969), pp. 5-6.]
Carlos Castaneda wrote in his reply letter to R. Gordon Wasson, dated 6 September 1968:
[Don Juan] is not a pure Yaqui, that is, his mother was a Yuma Indian, and he was born in Arizona. His mixed origin seems to have rendered him as a marginal man from the beginning.
[Carlos Castaneda, Letter to R. Gordon Wasson dated 6 September 1968, Botany Library of Oakes Ames, Harvard University: W1.1 Folder 139.]
For an anthropologist, this is very important information which concerns the cultural provenience of the principal informant for an academic study, and yet Castaneda only makes reference to the Yuma Indians twice in all the books he wrote:
Don Juan’s images of death disturbed me. I could not find adequate words to voice my questions and I stammered. He started at me, smiling, and coaxed me to speak.
I asked him if the manner in which a warrior saw his death depended on the way he had been brought up. I used the Yuma and Yaqui Indians as examples. My own idea was that culture determined the way in which one would envision death.
“It doesn’t matter how one was brought up,” he said. “What determines the way one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his personal power, and that sum determines how he lies and how he dies.”
“What is personal power?”
“Personal power is a feeling,” he said. “Something like being lucky. Or one may call it a mood. Personal power is something one acquires regardless of one’s origin. I have already told you that a warrior is a hunter of power, and that I am teaching you how to hunt and store it. The difficulty with you, which is the difficulty with all of us, is to be convinced. You need to believe that personal power can be used and that it is possible to store it, but you haven’t been convinced so far.”
[Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, Simon & Schuster (1973), pp. 191-192.]
Don Juan had been extremely sparing with information about his background and personal life. His reticence was, fundamentally, a didactic device; as far as he was concerned, his time began when he became a warrior; anything that happened to him before was of very little consequence.
All la Gorda and I knew about his early life was that he was born in Arizona of Yaqui and Yuma Indian parentage. When he was still an infant his parents took him to live with the Yaquis in northern Mexico. At ten years of age, he was caught in the tide of the Yaqui wars. His mother was killed then, and his father was apprehended by the Mexican army. Both don Juan and his father were sent to a relocation center in the farthest southern state of Yucatan. He grew up there.
[Carlos Castaneda, The Eagle’s Gift, Simon & Schuster (1981), p. 171.] [This version of don Juan’s early life is at variance with the version he gives to R. Gordon Wasson in his reply letter in 1968. According to the letter, don Juan was deported to the state of Veracruz, but later moved to the area of el Valle Nacional in the neighbouring state of Oaxaca, where he lived for over thirty years. It is also at variance with the story don Juan tells Carlos in A Separate Reality concerning the death of his parents: “The Mexican soldiers came upon us unexpectedly while my mother was cooking some food . . . They killed her for no reason at all . . . I thought they had killed my father too, but they hadn’t. He was wounded. Later they put us in a train like cattle and closed the door . . . My father died of his wounds in that wagon.]
As soon as Castaneda understood that don Juan’s mother had been a Yuma Indian—this was probably early on in his work with don Juan, perhaps as early as 1961—he would have hightailed it to the UCLA library when he got back to California from Mexico in order to find anything he could concerning the Yuma Indian tribe of Arizona and Southern California. After all, the teachings of don Juan now appeared to be a Yaqui/Yuma/Mazatec way of knowledge. The only substantial monograph on this subject that he would have found in the UCLA library system is The Ethnography of the Yuma Indians by C. Daryll Forde, published by the University of California Press in 1931. That which follows is an excerpt from this book which concerns the practice of healing and witchcraft among the Yuma Indians:
MEDICINE AND MAGIC
The aboriginal theories of disease and the belief in and practice of magical rites which will produce and cure sickness still persist among the Yuma despite the influence of American culture and the recognition that the doctors in the Agency hospital are “clever and have great power.”
During the keruk [Yuman commemoration ceremony] of 1929, a girl of about seventeen lay in the brush a few yards from the clearing throughout the whole period. She was in the hands of a doctor who was attempting to cure a chest complaint. Although the doctor did not take exception to my presence, I was unfortunately prevented from approaching closely by the objections of the parents.
Eixarch (1775-76) recounts a curing by Pedro, leader of the village near Pilot Knob (Algodones):
Last night I heard this fellow chanting a canticle very deliberately and melancholic, having a sick man in his house to whom he gives such rubbings of the belly with sand that only a brute would be able to stand it. He blows on him many times and then blows against the wind making many passes as he blows. They say that in order to perform his office properly he bathes himself very carefully early in the morning.
He also notes the interesting fact that a Yuma performed the usual curing practices in an endeavor to cure the wound of a horse.
Since dreamed power is essential for the performance of any important public duty, the doctor is not set off sharply from the rest of the community. Many men are dreamers. The leaders, the singers, the funeral orators, all dream their power. The doctor may at the same time be a singer, an orator, or a “chief.” Moreover, the doctor’s claims are usually modest. His powers cover only a certain range of sickness or misfortune, beyond which he cannot go. He alone decides on the basis of his dreams or the advice of his guardian spirit what he is competent to treat. He regards his curing power as essentially of the same type as any other “power.” As Kroeber says of the Mohave, there is “a complete interweaving of shamanistic beliefs and curative practices with the national mythology and . . . complete dependence of both on individual dreaming.”
Yet the power of a doctor is in one important aspect distinct from that of an orator or leader. The spirit, whom he encounters on his dream visit to avïkwame’, remains faithful to him throughout his life, advises him when to accept a patient and how to treat the disease. The spirit in return demands obedience from the doctor.
If one is to be a great doctor the spirit appears before the man is born, when he is only one or two months in the womb. As he grows up, he is shown may things but he does not cure yet. The one thing that the spirits impress on those they have chosen is that they must always obey and never doubt the power of the spirit. A man may have been shown how to cure many sicknesses but he may not attempt to do so until the spirit tells him. His obedience is often tested. His relatives may fall ill and he will want to try to save them; but if he tries to cure before the spirit tells him that he is ready he will himself fall sick. This happened to an old Kamya who had been getting great power. A prominent man fell ill and he said he would like to cure him. He succeeded but shortly after fell dangerously ill. He almost died and afterwards said that his spirit [i.e., guardian spirit] had appeared to him during his sickness and had told him that he had lost all his power through disobedience.
Each doctor had his own particular spirit. Lincoln Johnson and Miguel claimed that these spirits were connected with animals. The relation was somewhat obscure.
Badger, Fox, Crow, Sun, Moon and other spirits appeared to doctors. The spirits do not appear in the form after which they are named. The spirits themselves are those of the first people who were created, who had great power, far more than men today. They tried to create men as the Creator himself had done, but succeeded only in making animals after which they themselves were named. Some say that the Creator was angry with them and turned them into the animals which they had created.
The spirits of the two doctors, Manuel and Steve, who described their dreams and powers, had, however, no animal qualities or associations. Their names were abstract and remarkably similar-tenya’m kweny masa’-v (darkness, very pure) [Manuel] and tenya’m kwenya’me’ts (darkness, opposite to?) [Steve]. Badger and Raccoon spirits appeared to Manuel and taught him single cures, but they were not the chief source of his power.
The power of a doctor is limited by the scope of his dreams and the instructions of the spirit. Manuel Thomas, an old man of over eighty who had cured for many years, explained that:
A doctor gets his power for one sickness specially, that power may be good to cure other things, but he will not be so good for them. The visit to Avikwame’ that the doctor makes when he is asleep gives him a general knowledge and power for curing. But for really great power he has to perform a cure of the disease while he is there. A few doctors have had many good dreams and are very powerful for many sicknesses. When a man is sick he gets the best doctor for his sickness that is around. If he is not so good, the doctor will send him on to another and he will get moved around until he is cured or dies. The Yuma are not angry if a doctor cannot cure, they are sorry his power is not so good and go to another. They do not try to hurt a doctor if the sick person dies unless they are sure it is witchcraft. But doctors don’t often use witchcraft, they do not get the power for that, but only to cure the sicknesses they have dreamed of.
The existence of several broad categories of curing is implied in the special terms employed:
etsatce’v, sickness curer (etsara’v, sickness)
avetc&’v, snake (bite) curer
i’patce’v, arrow wound curer
xw6manatce’v, stunned curer
alye’cate.’v, fracture curer
metu5a’vAtc&’v, witch doctor (curer of bewitchment)
xelyatsamedma’, ghost dreamer
Within the general category of sickness (etsara’v) any one doctor will claim to be able to cure only certain forms, but the diagnosis depends largely on the doctor himself, sometimes with but scant attention to the symptoms of disease.
The relation of the doctor, his familiar spirit, and the patient is somewhat obscure and is said to vary in different diseases. In general, the spirit merely instructs the doctor to undertake treatment and gives him the strength to effect the cure. With Manuel Thomas, as will be seen, the spirit does not appear to him whenever he is called to cure. Manuel decides his ability to cure by his own state of mind, which is optimistic and vigorous when he has the right power and apathetic and reluctant when he has not. He describes the power as always latent within him and makes no reference to direct vision of the spirit at the time of curing.
I had my dreams first when I was quite young [about 12 years old] but I did not try to cure until I was an old man. I remembered them quite clearly always and never forgot anything in them. If I hear of a sick person something tells me whether his illness is one I would be good for. This may happen even if I have not had a dream and power especially for his sickness. If I feel right, I know that if they have come for me, I will be able to cure the man. When I have a good feeling, I am very strong and light inside and any other doctor who works on the sick one usually fails. The patient and his relations know too, for I seem to draw the sick man to me. Always, I think, I have been asked to cure when I felt strong for it, and on these occasions, I am always successful. When I am called to go to the sick man, I have a different (i.e., special) feeling; it is like being back on the Mountain. There is some fluid in me which I have drawn from the air and I do not mind walking a great distance. I do not know how far I have travelled. When I work on the patient it does not tire me at all and it makes me very happy. Generally, I can cure very quickly then, maybe in a, few hours or in a. day or two. Sometimes I feel quite different about it, I don’t get any good feeling and though I do my best I do not often cure then. I don’t get any feeling of lightness and when I go away from the sick man, I don’t want to return to him. I feel heavy and tired and very sleepy at night. I think about all the jobs I have to do around here and cannot keep my mind on the sick man. I know it is really no good me trying to help him even if I have had a dream for his sickness. But I do not always know how things are going to be. Sometimes I do not feel really good until I begin to cure. Other times I lose a lot of strength when I start to work on the patient and it does not go well. One dream often gives power to cure several sicknesses, the doctor knows in his dream exactly what it is for. I can cure five or six and can give you the names of more, but I do not know them all.
In witchcraft, however, both in the bewitchment and curing, the spirit is believed to enter the doctor and true possession occurs. When a patient is on the point of death the doctor also attempts by singing to induce the spirit to enter his (the doctor’s) body, whence it passes into the sick man in an effort to draw his soul back into his body. Doctors may also, according to Miguel, speak as the spirit in these cases; indeed, it is the spirit speaking but using the voice of the doctor because it has no voice of its own.
The patient, also, may have a guardian spirit who protects him through life. This spirit will assist in the cure. Pat’s wife has such a spirit which follows her all the time and speaks to her in dreams. She has never seen it, for it always speaks from behind, but it is a female spirit. She has no name for it. Once it saved her life, for she was very sick and unconscious and no one could do her any good. As they sat around her, suddenly a, voice was heard speaking through her mouth, very gently but strong, saying, “Go and get onyakalak,” a doctor who lived some distance away. The voice was different from her ordinary voice. Her father tried to make it speak again but it didn’t answer. They sent for the doctor, who came a long distance and cured her, after everybody had thought that she would die.
Sicknesses which appear similar may yet be caused in entirely different ways. Four distinct causes of sickness emerge from the descriptive data obtained from Manuel Thomas and Stephen Kelly.
1. Sickness from natural causes, which include fractures, physical injuries, and colics from bad food. In this category fall numerous ailments of children which are usually ascribed to some mishap before or at birth. The alleged causes, although fanciful, do not involve any magical or dream influence. Massage and blowing of saliva on the injured part are used to aid the cure.
2. Dream poisoning by spirits in which the poison must be sucked out by the doctor. The seat of the poison may also be brushed with feathers and pointed at with the finger or a short stick.
3. Soul loss consequent on a severe blow resulting in unconsciousness, or due to the efforts of ghosts (i.e., the spirits of the dead) to carry off the soul of the patient, especially when weakened by other sickness. The blowing of tobacco smoke and the spraying of saliva frothed up in the mouth are devices employed to aid the recovery of the soul.
4. Bewitchment, in which one individual, generally a doctor, induces sickness in another by magical means with the aid of a spirit.
SORCERY
Bewitchment (metuδa’uk—he is bewitched) is generally practiced only by doctors. Only those who have a very powerful spirit can do it, and a doctor who bewitches (metuδauvu’k) can also cure victims of witchcraft (metuδavacē’v). Sometimes ordinary people bewitch; they suddenly get the power. Steven Kelly gave an account of a bewitchment and cure he witnessed as a young man. It was corroborated by Miguel:
Witch doctors get their power from the etsö’r (hawk). On New Year’s Day in 1897 I was coming over to the horse-racing along the river bank, and was met by a friend. We came along together and after about half a mile stopped to wait for some others. In front of a house close by a girl was standing. She looked at us and then turned her back.
Later in the day we were riding home in a bunch when my friend came up to me and said, ” There’s something wrong with me, I think I ‘m going to die. ” And as he spoke, he toppled off his horse and fell to the ground. When I got down to him, he was dead. We tried to revive him with water but could not and sent word. back ‘to the relatives who came and took his body home. One of them suspected that he had been bewitched and sent for the witch doctor. He came at last and about two dozen of us watched the cure. The witch doctor had red feathers in his hair and the upper half of his face was painted black. He laid the body with its head to the east and as he placed it in position it showed some signs of life and began to twitch all over.
The doctor then stood several yards away to the south of the man. Walking slowly towards him and moving round to his head, he sang his first song. The man now became quite quiet and when he reached the head the doctor leaned over and placed a round mirror on his patient’s chest. The mirror was in place of the bowl of water which doctors used in the old days.
The doctor now stood on the north side and began his second song, which he continued while making a complete circle around the patient, going west, south, east and back to north.
He then crouched over the man and sucked blood out of his chest, blew saliva into his ears and eyes, and stood up again ready to sing his third song as he made the same circuit again. Stopping once more at the north he looked into the mirror for a long time and then began singing again as he walked around for the fourth time.
The man was now cured. Although he was very weak, he was able to sit up and after four days fasting, he was quite well. After the fourth song the doctor spoke to the relatives and said that the man had stood near the house of a young woman. No one had known this but myself and I had not spoken to the doctor, yet he knew all that had happened. He saw it all in the mirror. In the old days the doctors used to fill a small bowl of water in which ground charcoal had been allowed to settle at the bottom. Because the man recovered, they did not try to punish the girl. Only a witch doctor can bewitch a person and it is dangerous to interfere unless you are going to kill the bewitcher straight away. If the doctor fails to cure he will tell who did it and urge the relatives to kill the bewitcher.
For fear that he will direct his power against accusers the suspected sorcerer is not informed of his danger. Once a decision has been made the man selected for the task awaits a favorable opportunity when his victim is off guard, creeps up behind him, and kills him before he can resist.
It will be noticed that in this cure sucking was employed although the symptoms, from the native point of view, were those of soul loss. My informants claimed that any kind of sickness could be caused by bewitchment but most commonly an effort was made to drive out the victim’s soul. They could not expla.in why the doctor had sucked in his cure unless the girl had poisoned him when she stared. Nail parings, hair, or clothes, they thought, were not used in witchcraft. Miguel was told by a. witch doctor that he sent his spirit out over the universe to find the soul of the sick man which had been hidden by the sorcerer. It was the doctor’s own soul, not that of the guardian spirit, that undertook the search.
CHARMS
Milder forms of sorcery were also practiced in which an effort was made to control the body or will of another. For this purpose, charm substances were used. Manuel described the characteristics of to’fu’l haxnak (charm sickness; etso’u’l: charm). To influence others, the charm substance is generally smeared on the body by the charmer. A relatively stereotyped technique exists for its preparation.
An Indian goes into the hills to find charm stones; they are colored or transparent, but can be any shape. The stones must be ground up very fine into powder and mixed with red paint and, if possible, the intestines of some animal or bird. The lizard is very good. Men used this a great deal to weaken their enemies in fights and their competitors in races. The odor of the charm substance afflicts those who approach the charmer. In a race the runner with the most powerful charm goes ahead and the odor of his charm, causes those behind to sweat and breathe with difficulty. Without knowing the cause, they are tired out and get cramps. If the charm works for a long time, it causes boils over the body, swellings filled with watery substance which itch badly. A man came to me not long ago who had been charmed like this. Before I worked on him, I said that if I was successful in my cure the carrier of the charm would die. It is always like this; the power of the charm is driven back to its owner. The, charm bearer did die soon after. Sometimes when a person has a powerful charm his relatives about the house die off in consequence.
In the ordinary way charms (i.e., charm stones) are carried hidden about the body, but they are not so powerful this way. They will protect the wearer but it is hard to make another sick.
When curing charm sickness where there are sores like those I described, songs are not necessary. I froth saliva over my hands and massage the body from the head towards the feet.
Young men sometimes smear themselves with charm paint to attract women. For this they must also stop eating any fat, bread, or salt, then there is no danger of giving sickness. Girls get crazy for such a man. But if he lies with a girl, he has charmed in this way he must not copulate for four nights or she will become very sick. After that the danger is over and he can copulate. Women also use charms in a similar way to attract men that they want. Kwats humu’k (crystal) is a common charm. Another that is very powerful is icima, a pebble that is found in the desert. If you look at it with an open mind you will see a face on it and as you stare this little face twitches and begins to laugh and smile. If you put it down and look at it from a little distance the face will move from side to side. It is the face of the animal spirit I have already told about.
THE DOCTOR
The function of the doctor was to avert death and his technique was entirely magical. Manuel claimed that doctors never gave herbs to cure disease. Certain plants were used in cases of sickness but these usages were common knowledge and not alone sufficient to cure serious disorders. A doctor was not asked to cure unless the patient was so seriously ill that his life was threatened.
The doctor usually knew whether he could cure a sickness and was expected to tell the family of the patient. If he refused treatment without good reason he might be suspected of witchcraft. If successful the doctor was given presents such as blankets, horses, food, etc. If he failed, he got nothing. The family would often promise the presents in advance when asking the doctor to cure, but he was not expected to bargain or ask for more. If the family was rich, he would remain away until they offered a sufficiently large present.
During the cure he must fast and bathe at sunrise. He must not have intercourse with his wife and cannot cure while she is menstruating.
When working over a patient the doctor sits at his right side and points at the disease with the left hand.
A doctor does not lose his power as he grows old but he will stop curing when he can no longer endure the hardships of curing any more.
Foreign doctors are sometimes used but are not considered superior. Such are usually Kamya, Cocopa or Mohave and have the same dreams and power as Yuma. The Maricopa and the Yavapai use gourd rattles in curing, the Yuma do not (Miguel).
The equipment of the doctor is fundamentally non-material. A supernatural aura surrounds him and his songs, but he has practically no recourse to sleight-of-hand or other manipulatory skill in order to demonstrate his power. There is a surprising lack of apparatus. Ghost doctors sometimes wear hawk feathers; all carry a pouch containing tobacco and cane tubes for smoking and in which feathers for brushing and charm stones were sometimes kept. But the inevitable crystal which represents the “pain” in northern California and among the Pima to the east is absent. The juggling tricks of the Pima are not resorted to, and would be considered improper. The doctor has received a divine power, an immaterial essence which flows into him from his guardian spirit and ultimately from the creator himself. His duty is to transfer this power to the patient or use it to bring back his soul; any jugglery or physical demonstration is superfluous and inappropriate.
Trippel claims that at the time he visited the Yuma a doctor who made three false predictions of his power to cure in one family, or nine in the tribe as a whole, was killed. “Upon passing the limit in either case he is visited by a male relative of one of the patients who asks why he prophesied incorrectly. If the explanation is not satisfactory, he is quickly murdered with a mesquite club and nothing is said by the rest of the tribe.” So precise a regulation would seem unlikely. My informants said that a doctor was killed only when he was suspected of misusing or withholding his powers. A doctor would sometimes move away to another village or tribe to avoid the revenge of angered relatives. By now, however, the influence of American control has practically eliminated such killing and produced a tendency to minimize its former importance. The killing of failing doctors was general in the Lower Colorado region, to the west among the Yuman-speaking Diegueino, and very widely in California.
Doctors do not associate with one another, and form no societies.
In the old days there were doctors among all the groups of people [i.e., the different Yuma settlements], but each doctor was separate. Doctors did not go about or cure together. They did not meet together to discuss their powers. Once in a while they would mock each other saying that the other had no power, but generally they left each other alone. The doctors did not have any power to order people about and did not choose the leaders. (Manuel.)
Doctors do not speak of their powers in public because others might bewitch them for boasting. Sometimes two doctors quarrel and one challenges the other to bewitch him. They are left to fight it out themselves. (Miguel.)
The power of doctors is not inherited; each man must dream his own power. It is clear, however, that the children and relatives of doctors will tend, from their familiarity with “curing,” to believe that they have power. Miguel, for example, said, who died two years ago, was a very famous doctor. Soon after he died his son said he had dreams like his father and saw the same spirit. The spirit had not given him as much power as his father. One of the dead doctor’s brothers also said he had received power from the same spirit. In this way, without any formulated concept of inheritance, curing power tends to continue in the same family for several generations. Miguel, for example, said:
_____ who died two years ago, was a very famous doctor. Soon after he died his son said he had dreams like his father and saw the same spirit. The spirit had not given him as much power as his father. One of the dead doctor’s brothers also said he had received power from the same spirit.
In this way, without any formulated concept of inheritance, curing power tends to continue in the same family for several generations. [C. Daryll Ford, The Ethnography of the Yuma Indians, University of California Press (1931), selections from pp. 181-200.]
JIMSON WEED
Jimson weed, probably Datura discolor, is known as eemaLkapit (ear stopped up) on account of the buzzing it produces. Locoweed is the English term usually employed. Miguel could not remember anyone having taken it in the last twenty years. Joe had seen it given but had not taken it himself. It was not used ceremonially and was not associated with the acquisition of dream power. It was sometimes taken by those who wished to become doctors or leaders, but this was infrequent and, according to my informants, of doubtful value. The emphasis is rather on the direct acquisition of practical skill or foresight through the narcotic than on its use as a means of inducing dreams. Miguel knew of no doctor who had actually received his curing power in dreams received while under the influence of jimson weed. The ostensible reasons given were to acquire skill and worldly wisdom, and to foresee one’s fate. The activities of the patient while under the influence of the narcotic indicated their natural propensities. Women did not take it save in exceptional cases, e.g., of sickness. Older men would persuade the younger that it was an exciting experience and would prove of value to them. According to Joe Homer, jimson weed was especially valuable as a means of obtaining good crops. During the narcosis the youths were set to work clearing ground and pretending to plant. Their antics amused the onlookers but gave them great skill as cultivators.
Groups of young men, who had decided or been persuaded to take it, put themselves in the hands of a man who could administer it safely. As among the Mohave, the leaves of the plant are used. These are in suitable condition in the late fall and winter and should be taken from plants which grow far from human habitations; only those leaves on the north side of plants should be picked. The concoction should be prepared by one who has abstained from sexual intercourse for a considerable period, and women should be kept away. The juice of the leaves is squeezed into a bowl of warm water and each patient is given suitable quantity.
Miguel’s father was one of a group of six who took jimson weed in their youth. It was administered by a witch doctor who told them he could impart his powers to them when they were under the influence of the drug. The youths fasted for four days, drinking only a little water. The drug was then administered in the early morning under a shade. For several hours they were unconscious. When they regained consciousness in the afternoon several of them recounted dreams and began to act strangely. Some were bombastic, others went through the forms of curing people. The doctor remained with them for four days, fearing that they would wander off and attempt to drown themselves, or lie in the sun and become ill. They did not acquire any power.
It might be taken several times during one’s life, whenever, in fact, one desired it. The sick often drank jimson weed, especially when they had been ailing for a long time and had obtained no relief from doctors. Miguel knew an old woman who took it in this way at the suggestion of her relative. She remained in a trance for four days and went about acting as though she were cooking food. When she got better, she said everything had seemed dark to her except dangerous things such as rattlesnakes and ants. These were all around her but they had the appearance of fire, so that she was able to avoid them. Jimson weed was not used as an anaesthetic or anodyne.
It was sometimes used to stimulate horses in racing. The rider would chew the leaves and blow the frothed saliva into the horse’s nostrils about an hour before the race.
Jimson weed seeds are used as a remedy for burns and sores. They are roasted and made into a poultice which is placed on the wound.
It was not regarded as a direct aid in magical power. It was not taken by doctors to strengthen their power or enable them to see the patient’s disease. Lost objects were not sought in dreams induced by the weed. No reference to it occurs in any myth, and, according to my informants, there is “no story about it.”
The use of jimson weed remains unattached to the ceremonial or spiritual life, a curious and valuable experience, but little more. The use of the narcotic, which extends from Peru and Chile to the Great Basin is especially developed in south and central California and the southwest. But the Yuma and similar Cocopa practices cannot be aligned simply with any one of the three specializations that occur in this region, i.e., among the Yokuts, the Southern Californian Shoshones, and the Pueblos. The general pattern, i.e., the obtaining of good fortune and foreseeing the future, is present but certain features which are generally characteristic are absent. The disassociation from divination of disease or loss of objects distinguishes it from Pueblo and Yokuts usage. At a relatively recent date the jimson weed, doubtless known and used before, was introduced into a sib initiation rite for males among the Southern Californians. Some traces of the pattern developed there are apparent on the Colorado in the restriction to males, except for sickness and the group drinking with exclusion of women.
[C. Daryll Ford, The Ethnography of the Yuma Indians, p. 205.]
Two important concepts in the “teachings of don Juan,” the interpretation and manipulation of dreams in the quest for personal power, and the ceremonial use of the hallucinogen Jimson weed for this same purpose, were both important concepts in the spiritual traditions of certain Yuman speaking Indian tribes in Arizona and California, namely: the Quechan (Yuma) tribe, the Maricopa tribe, and the Mojave tribe. If Carlos Castaneda is to be believed, don Juan’s mother had belonged to the Quechan tribe; thus, it is not farfetched to assume that don Juan had been instructed in the rudiments, at least, of these two practices by his mother’s people; provided, of course, that Castaneda had not misappropriated some of the concepts in the teachings of his Yaqui/Yuma informant from the anthropological literature that was available in the UCLA library system. After all, don Juan would have only spent his early childhood amongst his mother’s people. All things considered; I think that the latter of these two possibilities, that Castaneda fabricated some of his ethnological field data, is the more probable:
“The devil’s weed [Jimson weed] was my benefactor’s ally. It could have been mine also, but I didn’t like her.”
“Why didn’t you like the devil’s weed, don Juan?”
“She has a serious drawback.”
“Is she inferior to other ally powers?”
“No. Don’t get me wrong. She is as powerful as the best of allies, but there is something about her which I personally don’t like.”
“Can you tell me what it is?”
“She distorts men. She gives them a taste of power too soon without fortifying their hearts and makes them domineering and unpredictable. She makes them weak in the middle of their great power.”
“Isn’t there any way to avoid that?”
“There is a way to overcome it, but not to avoid it. Whoever becomes the weed’s ally must pay that price.”
“How can one overcome that effect, don Juan?”
“The devil’s weed has four heads: the root, the stem and leaves, the flowers, and the seeds. Each one of them is different, and whoever becomes her ally must learn about them in that order. The most important head is in the roots. The power of the devil’s weed is conquered through the roots. The stem and leaves are the head that cures maladies; properly used, this head is a gift to mankind. The third head is in the flowers, and it is used to turn people crazy, or to make them obedient, or to kill them. The man whose ally is the weed never intakes the flowers, nor does he intake the stem and leaves, for that matter, except in cases of his own illness; but the roots and the seeds are always taken; especially the seeds; they are the fourth head of the devil’s weed and the most powerful of the four.
“My benefactor used to say the seeds are the “sober head” – the only part that could fortify the heart of man. The devil’s weed is hard with her protégés, he used to say, because she aims to kill them fast, a thing she ordinarily accomplishes before they can arrive at the secrets of the “sober head”. There are, however, tales about men who have unravelled the secrets of the sober head. What a challenge for a man of knowledge!”
“Did your benefactor unravel such secrets?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Have you met anyone who has done it?”
“No. But they lived at a time when that knowledge was important.”
“Do you know anyone who has met such men?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Did your benefactor know anyone?”
“He did.”
“Why didn’t he arrive at the secrets of the sober head?”
“To tame the devil’s weed into an ally is one of the most difficult tasks I know. She never became one with me, for example, perhaps because I was never fond of her.”
“Can you still use her as an ally in spite of not being fond of her?”
“I can; nevertheless, I prefer not to. Maybe it will be different for you.”
“Why is it called the devil’s weed?”
Don Juan made a gesture of indifference, shrugged his shoulders, and remained quiet for some time. Finally he said that “devil’s weed” was her temporary name [su nombre de leche]. He also said there were other names for the devil’s weed, but they were not to be used, because the calling of a name was a serious matter, especially if one was learning to tame an ally power. I asked him why the calling of a name was so serious a matter. He said names were reserved to be used only when one was calling for help, in moments of great stress and need, and he assured me that such moments happen sooner or later in the life of whoever seeks knowledge.
[Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, University of California Press (1968), pp. 56-57.]
I think we may assume that don Juan was well acquainted with the various uses of Jimson weed (Datura stramonium) among the Indians. As well as asserting that don Juan was a brujo(sorcerer), Castaneda implies that don Juan was also a competent yerbero (herbalist) and possibly a trained curandero (healer). Known as toloache in Nahuatl, the various species of the genus Datura have been used medicinally—usually for external administration because of the plants’ extreme toxicity—by most, if not all, of the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica since pre-Columbian times. Ceremonial use, in which various preparations of Datura were administered internally, was comparatively rare.
In the book The Teachings of Don Juan, don Juan explains to Carlos that he had learned everything he knew about Jimon weed from his benefactor—who, as Castaneda implied in his letter to R. Gordon Wasson, “must have been Mazateco.” However, the Mazatec people, who live mainly in the Sierra Mazateca region of the state of Oaxaca, do not have any traditions concerning a ceremonial use of toloache. The neighbouring Mixtec people (la Mixteca Alta de Oaxaca) and the Zapotec people (Valles Centrales de Oaxaca), on the other hand, do have such traditions. Is it then worthwhile to speculate whether don Juan’s benefactor’s benefactor had been Mixtec or Zapotec? Knowing Castaneda’s propensity for fabricating ethnological data, it is probably not worth our while to speculate.
Nonetheless, some of the ethnological data in Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, which concern the ritual use of Jimson weed were not necessarily fabricated. At the conclusion of the spring semester at UCLA in 1960, that is, before he ever met don Juan, Carlos Castaneda submitted a term paper that purported to describe certain traditions among indigenous Californians regarding the ceremonial use of Jimson weed. Castaneda’s professor for the first-year course in field archaeology, Clement Meighan, was delighted with the paper. Professor Meighan had guaranteed his students that any of them who should manage to interview a Native American, for the purpose of writing the obligatory term paper, would receive the highest possible grade for the course. Carlos Castaneda received an A at the end of term. Unfortunately for historians of The Teachings of Don Juan phenomenon, term papers are not usually archived, but are handed back, graded and with comments by the lecturer, to the undergraduate. Thus, it is not possible to compare the content of Castaneda’s term paper from 1960 with his published description of the Jimson-weed ceremony in The Teachings of Don Juan. All that can be said with certainty is that the term paper was already submitted when Castaneda embarked on the field trip to Arizona and New Mexico in the late summer of 1960, during which he first (and very briefly) met don Juan. It will probably never be known whom Castaneda had interviewed for his term paper. It has been speculated that the informant might have been the Cahuilla shaman and tribal elder Salvador Lopez, who lived on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Palm Springs, California; however, there is no proof that Castaneda had ever even met this man, much less had ever actually worked with him. But whoever the informant might have been, it could not have been don Juan. Moreover, there is the possibility that there never was an interview, and that Castaneda simply fabricated the data underlying his term paper. I would not put it past him.
The other concept in the “teachings of don Juan” that may have been misappropriated by Castaneda from the Ethnography of the Yuma Indians by C. Daryll Ford, and/or from the works of Edward Winslow Gifford (1887-1959), who was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkley, concerns the acquisition of spiritual power through the manipulation of dreams:
He stood up and patted me gently on the head and said in a very soft voice, “I am going to teach you how to become a warrior in the same manner I have taught you how to hunt. I must warn you, though, learning how to hunt has not made you into a hunter, nor would learning how to become a warrior make you one.” I experienced a sense of frustration, a physical discomfort that bordered on anguish. I complained about the vivid dreams and nightmares I was having. He seemed to deliberate for a moment and sat down again.
“They’re weird dreams,” I said.
“You’ve always had weird dreams,” he retorted.
“I’m telling you, this time they are truly more weird than anything I’ve ever had.”
“Don’t concern yourself. They are only dreams. Like the dreams of any ordinary dreamer, they don’t have power. So what’s the use of worrying about them or talking about them?”
“They bother me, don Juan. Isn’t there something I can do to stop them?”
“Nothing. Let them pass,” he said. “Now it’s time for you to become accessible to power, and you are going to begin by tackling dreaming.” The tone of voice he used when he said “dreaming” made me think that he was using the word in a very particular fashion. I was pondering about a proper question to ask when he began to talk again. “I’ve never told you about dreaming, because until now I was only concerned with teaching you how to be a hunter,” he said. “A hunter is not concerned with the manipulation of power, therefore his dreams are only dreams. They might be poignant but they are not “dreaming.”
“A warrior, on the other hand, seeks power, and one of the avenues to power is dreaming. You may say that the difference between a hunter and a warrior is that a warrior is on his way to power, while a hunter knows nothing or very little about it.
“The decision as to who can be a warrior and who can only be a hunter is not up to us. That decision is in the realm of the powers that guide men. That’s why your playing with Mescalito was such an important omen. Those forces guided you to me; they took you to that bus depot, remember? Some clown brought you to me. A perfect omen, a clown pointing you out. So, I taught you how to be a hunter. And then the other perfect omen, Mescalito himself playing with you. See what I mean?” His weird logic was overwhelming. His words created visions of myself succumbing to something awesome and unknown, something which I had not bargained for, and which I had not conceived existed, even in my wildest fantasies.
“What do you propose I should do?” I asked.
“Become accessible to power; tackle your dreams,” he replied, “You call them dreams because you have no power. A warrior, being a man who seeks power, doesn’t call them dreams, he calls them real.”
“You mean he takes his dreams as being reality?”
“He doesn’t take anything as being anything else. What you call dreams are real for a warrior. You must understand that a warrior is not a fool. A warrior is an immaculate hunter who hunts power; he’s not drunk, or crazed, and he has neither the time nor the disposition to bluff, or to lie to himself, or to make a wrong move. The stakes are too high for that. The stakes are his trimmed orderly life which he has taken so long to tighten and perfect. He is not going to throw that away by making some stupid miscalculation, by taking something for being something else.
“Dreaming is real for a warrior because in it he can act deliberately, he can choose and reject, he can select from a variety of items those which lead to power, and then he can manipulate them and use them, while in an ordinary dream he cannot act deliberately.”
“Do you mean then, don Juan, that dreaming is real?”
“Of course it is real.”
“As real as what we are doing now?”
“If you want to compare things, I can say that it is perhaps more real. In dreaming you have power; you can change things; you may find out countless concealed facts; you can control whatever you want.”
Don Juan’s premises always had appealed to me at a certain level. I could easily understand his liking the idea that one could do anything in dreams, but I could not take him seriously. The jump was too great.
[Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, Simon & Schuster (1973), pp. 119-120.]
Intentionally acquiring the ability to dream lucidly, an ability that Castaneda, in his books, calls “the art of dreaming,” is a concept within the teachings of don Juan that was first brought to light in the third book of the series, Journey to Ixtlan (see the excerpt quoted above). It seems odd to me that such an important concept should not have at least been mentioned in either the first book, The Teachings of Don Juan, or the second book, A Separate Reality. After all, what Castaneda calls “dreaming” would appear to be a practice that can lead the practitioner to paranormal ability, amply evidenced in the fifth book of the series, The Second Ring of Power, and the last book that was published in his lifetime, The Art of Dreaming. One might conclude that Castaneda simply did not become aware of the importance of the concept for the teachings of don Juan until towards the end of his association with don Juan, an end which purportedly occurred in 1973 when Castaneda claims that don Juan “burned with the fire from within.” (Let us skip the fancy euphemism and conclude that don Juan may have died in 1973.) Or one might conclude that dreaming was a practice that Castaneda himself had dreamed up. I would not put it past him.
In summing up, I would like to contend—and probably not for the last time on this website—that Carlos Castaneda did actually meet, and subsequently also work with, a sorcerer and self-professed “man of knowledge,” a Yaqui Indian from the Valle del Yaqui in the state of Sonora, Mexico. I believe that this contention is well-supported in the photocopies of field notes that Castaneda had sent to R. Gordon Wasson in 1968, photocopies which are safely preserved in the Botany Library of Oakes Ames at Harvard University. The field documents that Castaneda photocopied for Wasson’s benefit had been, in my judgement, authentic, and not, as Richard de Mille and others after him have claimed, literary forgeries. Of this much, I am entirely convinced. However, most of what occurred during the interactions of these two individuals, the student of anthropology and the informant, must necessarily be extrapolated from the narrative in Castaneda’s first three books. This narrative, as I hope I have been able to show in this blog post, cannot be trusted to be any more than a very fictionalised approximation of what really happened. Therefore, I do not insist upon my personal extrapolation.
The quest for Castaneda. Richard de Mille of Montecito, Calif., is a man with a mission. Mr. De Mille, a former university psychology teacher, is determined to discover the truth about the life and works of Carlos Castaneda, whose five books – ”The Teachings of Don Juan,” ”A Separate Reality,” ”Journey to Ixtlan,” ”Tales of Power” and ”The Second Ring of Power” – profess to report the author’s conversations during an 18-year apprenticeship with a Mexican Indian shaman named Don Juan Matus. These collections of ”anthropological fieldnotes” have sold over 10 million copies in this country and are among the most influential testaments of the youth culture of the past dozen years.
It bothers Mr. de Mille that these books, which Joyce Carol Oates and a number of other literary critics have said ”read like fiction,” have been taken so seriously by poets, scientists, philosophers, religious leaders and the press. It concerns him that one of them won Mr. Castaneda a Ph.D. in anthropology from U.C.L.A. and another was published as a work of serious scholarship by the University of California Press before the series was taken over by New York publishing houses, most recently Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books.
Mr. de Mille is convinced that Mr. Castaneda is ”one of the great intellectual hoaxers” of all time. He has never succeeded in meeting the man face to face -Mr. Castaneda lives invisibly somewhere in the Los Angeles area – but during the past five years he has stalked his prey’s persona in libraries. What he has discovered is presented in two books issued by well-regarded Santa Barbara publishers: ”Castaneda’s Journey” (Capra Press, $4.95) and the just-released ”The Don Juan Papers” (Ross-Erikson, $8.95). [Ray Walters, New York Times, 11 January 1981.]
10 million copies sold by 1981—at a royalty rate of 10%, this would have made Carlos Castaneda a millionaire by 1981. According to the Wikipedia article concerning Castaneda (wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos Castaneda), more than twenty-eight million copies of his books have been sold between 1968 and 2023. (This figure should probably be taken with a good pinch of salt. Nevertheless, it seems clear that Castaneda has sold an astounding number of books.) How many people in the world have read at least one of his books, cover to cover? This is a question that is difficult to supply an answer to. I think we might conservatively estimate the number of such people to be approximately equal to the population of the New York Metropolitan Area (23.6 million residents in 2021). If this estimate should prove reasonable, or even reasonable to only fifty percent, it would undoubtedly show Castaneda to have been a very influential person. In comparison, the total number of living people in the world who have read Walden by Henry David Thoreau (forever my favourite philosopher) from cover to cover is perhaps equal to the population of Albany, New York (98,617 residents in 2021). Thoreau was, however, a literary figure of towering stature, while Castaneda was demonstrably an academic fraud with an almost total lack of moral scruples—and, to boot, a writer of rather questionable talent. (Ultimately, much of the readability of his published works should probably be credited to the skill of his editors: Michael Korda, former editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, for his original English-language manuscripts; and the incomparable Juan Tovar for the Spanish translations of his first four books.) How could so many people—me included—have been so incredibly gullible to bother about Castaneda at all once his credibility was put into serious doubt by the 1973 article, Magic and Reality, by Sandra Burton in Time Magazine, and certainly once the credibility he might still have had after 1973 was practically destroyed at the publication of Richard de Mille’s book, Castaneda’s Journey, in 1976?
The Whole Earth Catalog, initially published in 1968, included a review of The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda:
This book records the experiences of an anthropology student who becomes the apprentice of don Juan, a Yaqui Indian “man of knowledge” who is also a “diablero,” a black sorcerer. It is a profoundly disturbing book since it opens up areas and ideas we usually dismiss or deny. Don Juan, over a period of five years, teaches the author a little of his knowledge. He teaches through giving his apprentice various psycho-active plants: peyote, datura, and a mixture of psilocybin mushrooms, Genista canariensis, and other plants. Each of these plants has its own way of teaching, its own demands, and its own kind of power. For those of us who thought we understood psychedelic effects, this book reveals the rudimentary state of our knowledge. For those of us who have dismissed magic as a combination of hypnosis and stage effects we are confronted with powerful and effective magic which seems irrefutable.
Don Juan himself appears as a powerful, indecipherable, wise man whose knowledge is both extensive and alien to our own. He offers to each of us the possibility of dealing with other realities, but he makes it clear that all these ways are dangerous, difficult, and once entered, cannot be put aside as simply another experience.
The goal of his teaching is partially expressed as follows:
“The particular thing to learn is how to get to the crack between the worlds and how to enter the other world. There is a crack between the two worlds, the world of the diableros and the world of living men. There is a place where these two worlds overlap. The crack is there. It opens and closes like a door in the wind. To get there a man must exercise his will. He must I should say, develop an indominable desire for it, a single-minded dedication. But he must do without the help of any power or any man. . .”
Not a book to be read for pleasure, a book which will affect you more than you wish to be affected. [Reviewed by James Fadiman.] (Why not read it for pleasure? It’s frontier Boswell and Johnson—SB.) [Whole Earth Catalog, Editor: Stewart Brand, Portola Institute, California (1968), p.60.]
The review of The Teachings of Don Juan by Carlos Castaneda in the initial issue (September 1968) of the Whole Earth Catalog, quoted immediately above, was possibly instrumental in the launching of the author from obscurity into celebrity. His book was first published in June of 1968, but it had largely found a readership by word of mouth, mostly in the Los Angeles area, that is, until an intriguing description of the book’s content effectively reached followers of the countercultural movement by means of the Whole Earth Catalog. It appeared from Castaneda’s field research that one might achieve an alternative, much more edifying perspective on the human condition through the ritually controlled use of hallucinogens like peyote, datura, and psilocybin mushrooms. In 1968 and 1969, few, if any, of the readers of Castaneda’s first book intuited that the book might be fictional with respect to the use of hallucinogens in the so-called “teachings of don Juan.” Practically everyone had been led to believe that this was a work of academia. It was published by the University of California Press. There was even a structural analysis included at the end of the book. It is true; some of Castaneda’s experiences under the influence of hallucinogens were outlandish by any standard. Be this as it may, the quintessential hallucinogen of the countercultural movement was undoubtedly LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), with DMT (dimethyltryptamine) running a close second place. Both of these synthetic hallucinogens are quite capable of producing hallucinatory experiences on parr with the experiences Castaneda described in his book. Thus, there was really no good reason to suspect that what he had written in The Teachings of Don Juan had been, by and large, fictional, and that, with the possible exception of peyote, his informant had not actually been “an expert in the use of three such [psychotropic] plants: Datura inoxia, commonly known as jimson weed; Lophophora williamsii, known as peyote; and a hallucinogenic mushroom of the genus Psilocybe.” (Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, p. 7.)
Journey to Ixtlan, Castaneda’s third book about his apprenticeship with the Yaqui Indian sorcerer Juan Matus, was published in 1972. Unbeknownst to the general public, this volume also served as Castaneda’s doctoral dissertation, but with a different title, Sorcery: A Description of the World. In the introduction to Journey to Ixtlan, the author explains that “my perception of the world through the effects of those psychotropics had been so bizarre and impressive that I was forced to assume that such states were the only avenue to communicating and learning what don Juan was attempting to teach me. That assumption was erroneous. They were not the essential feature of the sorcerer’s description of the world, but were only an aid to cement, so to speak, parts of the description which I had been incapable of perceiving otherwise. Therefore, it was simply my lack of sensitivity which had fostered their use.”
In the case of my work with don Juan I have limited my efforts solely to viewing him as a sorcerer [Sp. Brujo] and to acquiring membership in his knowledge.
For the purpose of presenting my argument I must first explain the basic premise of sorcery [Sp. Brujería] as don Juan presented it to me. He said that for a sorcerer, the world of everyday life is not real, or out there, as we believe it is. For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description.
For the sake of validating this premise don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born.
He pointed out that everyone who comes into contact with a child is a teacher who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when a child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else. From that moment on, however, the child is a member. He knows the description of the world; and his membership becomes full-fledged, I suppose, when he is capable of making all the proper perceptual interpretations which, conforming to that description, validate it.
For don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common.
The idea that the perceptual interpretations that make up the world have a flow is congruous with the fact that they run uninterruptedly and are rarely, if ever open to question. In fact, the reality of the world we know is so taken for granted that the basic premise of sorcery, that our reality is merely one of many descriptions, could hardly be taken as a serious proposition. [Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, Simon & Schuster (1973), pp. 8-9.]
Don Juan stated that in order to arrive at “seeing” one first had to “stop the world.” “Stopping the world” was indeed an appropriate rendition of certain states of awareness in which the reality of everyday life is altered because the flow of interpretation, which ordinarily runs uninterruptedly, has been stopped by a set of circumstances alien to that flow. In my case the set of circumstances alien to my normal flow of interpretations was the sorcery description of the world. Don Juan’s precondition for “stopping the world” was that one had to be convinced; in other words, one had to learn the new description in a total sense, for the purpose of pitting it against the old one, and in that way break the dogmatic certainty, which we all share, that the validity of our perceptions, or our reality of the world, is not to be questioned. [Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, p. 14.]
Castaneda’s doctoral dissertation, A Sorcery Description of the World, is held on microfilm by the University of California, Las Angeles. This dissertation consists of the same main body of text contained in Journey to Ixtlan, but prefaced by a different, shorter introduction.
This is an emic account of an apprenticeship of sorcery as it is practiced by the American Indians of modern Mexico. The exact cultural boundaries of the phenomena described here were never determined; and the conclusion I have arrived at, after years of fieldwork, is that sorcery does not have a cultural focus, but is, rather, a series of skills practiced, in one form or another, by all the American Indian societies of the New World.
The data that comprises the present work was gathered over a period of ten years of sporadic fieldwork in northwestern Mexico, under the guidance and tutelage of a Yaqui Indian sorcerer, don Juan Matus, who in 1961 took me as his apprentice. Although I was not permitted to tape-record or photograph any event that took place during that time, I took notes and thus recorded in writing all the instances of our teacher-disciple relationship.
The main premises of this thesis, being an emic account, were statements voiced by the sorcerer-teacher. They pertain to the nature of the perception of reality. The sorcerer’s contention is that the world at large, or our physical surroundings, which appear to have an unquestionably independent and transcendental objectivity, are the product of the perceivers’ agreement on the nature of what they perceive. In other words, we, the perceivers, are the dynamic parts of the world, because we not only imbue it with meaning but also with “form.” Thus, the perceived realness of our surroundings is due to social consensus, rather than to its objective nature.
This basic premise of sorcery does not deny the objectivity of the world. For the sorcerer the world is not an illusion, quite the contrary, it is real, but its realness is not a fixed condition. In fact, it can be altered in part or it can be changed altogether; thus, the alleged magical properties of sorcery practices. This possibility of change is called “stopping the world,” and can be explained as the volitional interruption of ordinary consensus. The “techniques for stopping the world” entail that at the same time that ordinary consensus is interrupted another one is ensued, and in this way, a new “description” of the world is brought into “being.
The present emic account, therefore, deals with the “techniques” by virtue of which a new agreement about the nature of reality is attained with its concomitant, a new perceptual reality.
In the present work then, the teaching of sorcery, has been taken as a process of resocialization and sorcery, in general, has been taken as a case of an alien ”membership” made available to the non-member, in this case myself. The end result of this apprenticeship has been understood as the act of gaining membership. To have membership in sorcery therefore, means that the initiate becomes intimately familiar with all the known instances of the new perceptual reality he set out to attain. [Carlos Castaneda, A Sorcery Description of the World, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor MI (1973), p. 2.]
Journey to Ixtlan was the first book by Carlos Castaneda that I read. Once I had read the introduction to the book, I knew I was hooked. I must say that I was happy to learn that imbibing hallucinogens was not essential in following the teachings of don Juan. Reading the main body of text, however, made it evident that the book was structured much more like a novel than an academic dissertation or monograph; thus, I had my suspicions concerning its purported factuality. (After years of open debate by the various critics of Carlos Castaneda, especially since the death of the author in 1998, I think we can be well assured that Journey to Ixtlan is actually a novel, but, in my estimation, a novel that is loosely based on a true story, that is to say, on Castaneda’s real-life experiences with an indigenous Mexican sorcerer, real-life experiences that were, in my opinion, unreasonably and foolishly embellished by the author for the crass purpose of selling more books than would have been the case with a wholly nonfictional treatment of his experiences.)
An illuminating journey to Ixtlan can be taken by way of the “Goodreads” website. (https://www.goodreads.com/about/us “Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. Our mission is to help readers discover books they love and get more out of reading. Goodreads was launched in January 2007.”) At this website, Journey to Ixtlan has achieved an average rating of four stars out of five from 12,844 members as of 6 February 2024. The book has been reviewed onsite 485 times. Scrolling through all of these reviews, one can make several interesting assumptions concerning Carlos Castaneda’s general readership. Firstly, most people who have read Journey to Ixtlan have also read the first two books in the series. Secondly, practically all of the people who have read at least the first three books of the series consider Journey to Ixtlan to be their absolute favourite. And thirdly, perhaps most importantly, a considerable number of these people make it evident in their reviews that they are aware of the fact that the general consensus in academia is that all of the books by Carlos Castaneda are entirely fictional—in other words, the character don Juan [Matus] did not exist in real life—but that this state of affairs has not diminished the high regard in which they hold the book Journey to Ixtlan.
The question is, however, why this book is generally held in such high regard, even by people who, like me, have a very negative opinion of the author himself. I suggest that this is due to the reader spontaneously wishing the story to be true, despite all its fantastical aspects.
Let us consider the possibility that The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge would never have become a bestselling book had it not been published as late as 1968, at the height of the countercultural movement. Had the manuscript been submitted in 1965 as a thesis for the partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, as it seems was Castaneda’s original intention, it would probably have achieved only a small degree of notoriety, mostly within academia. (Castaneda had enrolled in the graduate program at UCLA in late 1962 after having achieved his Bachelor’s degree in anthropology at that same university.) The (in my estimation) entirely fictional A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan might never have been written and published as a follow-up book. However, I do believe he would subsequently have written and published a second book, possibly entitled The Lessons of Don Juan, as recompense for the erroneous assumption he had made in his first book that the altered states of consciousness produced by the ingestion of psychotropic plants “were the only avenue to communicating and learning what don Juan was attempting to teach me.” He would, of course, never have written Part Two of the book he did actually publish, Journey to Ixtlan, because he would probably not have written the book A Separate Reality, but would have ended his book, The Lessons of Don Juan, with the following:
I had a moment of strange sobriety and a series of thoughts occurred to me. On one level it was clear that what had taken place between me and “la Catalina” the first time I had confronted her was real. “La Catalina” was real, and I could not discard the possibility that she was actually following me. On the other level I could not understand how she was following me, and this gave rise to the fait suspicion that don Juan might be tricking me, and that he himself was somehow producing the weird effects I had witnessed.
Don Juan suddenly looked at the sky and told me that there was still time to go and check the sorceress. He reassured me that we were running very little danger, because we were only going to drive by her house.
“You must confirm her shape,” don Juan said. “Then there won’t be any doubts left in your mind, one way or the other.”
My hands began to sweat profusely and I had to dry them repeatedly with a towel. We got in my car and don Juan directed me to the main highway and then to a wide unpaved road. I drove in the center of it; heavy trucks and tractors have carved deep trenches and my car was too low to go on either the left of the right side of the road. We went slowly amid a thick cloud of dust. The coarse gravel which was used to level the road had lumped with dirt during the rains, and chunks of dry mud rocks bounced against the metal underside of my car, making loud explosive sounds.
Don Juan told me to slow down as we were coming to a small bridge. There were four Indians sitting there and they waved at us. I was not sure whether or not I knew them. We passed the bridge and the road curved gently.
“That’s the woman’s house,” don Juan whispered to me as he pointed with his eyes to a white house with a high bamboo fence all around it.
He told me to make a U-turn and stop in the middle of the road and wait and see if the woman became suspicious enough to show her face.
We stayed there for perhaps ten minutes. I thought it was an indeterminable time. Don Juan did not say a word. He sat motionless, looking at the house.
“There she is,” he said, and his body gave a sudden jump.
I saw the dark foreboding silhouette of a woman standing inside the house, looking through the open door. The room was dark and that only accentuated the darkness of the woman’s silhouette.
After a few minutes the woman stepped out of the darkness of the room and stood in the doorway and watched us. We looked at her for a moment and then don Juan told me to drive on. I was speechless. I could have sworn that she was the woman I had seen hopping by the road in the darkness.
About half an hour later, when we had turned onto the paved highway, don Juan spoke to me.
“What do you say?” he asked. “Did you recognize the shape?”
I hesitated for a long time before answering. I was afraid of the commitment entailed in saying yes. I carefully worded my reply and said that I thought it had been too dark to be completely sure.
He laughed and tapped me gently on my head.
“She was the one, wasn’t she?” he asked.
He did not give me time to reply. He put a finger to his mouth in a gesture of silence and whispered in my ear that it was meaningless to say anything, and that in order to survive “la Catalina’s” onslaughts I had to make use of everything he had taught me.
[THE END]
[Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, Simon & Schuster (1972), pp 270-272.]
Such a better ending this would have been! This alternative end of story would have linked coherently with the end of story in his first book, in which Carlos is pitted against an unnamed diablera (evil sorceress) (la Catalina?) who don Juan deduces has stolen his soul. During a night of terror, Carlos manages to win back his soul, but the experience has apparently upset his mental equilibrium:
The same day in the early evening don Juan took me into the hills around his house. There he gave me long and detailed instructions on specific fighting procedures. At one moment in the course of repeating certain prescribed steps I found myself alone. I had run up a slope and was out of breath. I was perspiring freely, and yet I was cold. I called don Juan several times, but he did not answer, and I began to experience a strange apprehension. I heard a rustling in the underbrush as if someone was coming towards me. I listened attentively, but the noise stopped. Then it came again, louder and closer. At that moment it occurred to me that the events of the preceding night were going to be repeated. In a matter of a few seconds my fear grew out of all proportion. The rustle in the underbrush got closer, and my strength waned. I wanted to scream or weep, run away or faint. My knees sagged; I fell to the ground, whining. I could not even close my eyes. Afte that, I remember only that don Juan made a fire and rubbed the contracted muscles of my arms and legs.
I remained in a state of profound distress for several hours. Afterwards don Juan explained my disproportionate reaction as a common occurrence. I said I could not figure out logically what had caused my panic, and he replied that it was not the fear of dying, but rather the fear of losing my soul, a fear common among men who do not have an unbending intent.
That experience was the last of don Juan’s teachings. Ever since that time I have refrained from seeking his lessons. And, although don Juan has not changed his benefactor’s attitude towards me, I do believe that I have succumbed to the first enemy of a man of knowledge. [Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, University of California Press (1968), pp. 184-185.]
It seems very apparent to me that, for most readers, the story in itself is the most important part of the whole Carlos Castaneda/don Juan phenomenon, regardless of how much of this story may actually be true, or whether or not any of it is true. The story’s relatability is, I believe, the characteristic which endears it to the reader. Anyone might have met a wise Mexican Indian named Juan, and considering the likelihood that Castaneda’s don Juan was a real person—which I believe is evidenced by the 12 pages of photocopied field notes held by Harvard University—a number of people, through the years, almost certainly did; however, as fate would have it, it was specifically Carlos Castaneda who wrote a series of books about the time he claimed to have spent with don Juan. And it is by means of these books, most importantly the book entitled Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, that millions of readers have also met the historical don Juan and have been tutored by him in accordance with his unique world view.
I was studying philosophy at the time I first read Journey to Ixtlan. A thorough reading and study of the book A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell was an integral part of the Bachelor’s level curriculum at the Department of Philosophy in Stockholm, Sweden. (I managed to procure a first-edition copy of the book, which is still on my bookshelf.) Once I had read Castaneda’s book, I understood that the teachings of don Juan are unparalleled in the history of philosophy, Eastern as well as Western. During an interview held towards the end of his long life, Bertrand Russell bemoaned the revelation he had then recently experienced in which he understood without any doubt that all the well-known philosophers in history, he himself included, had been fools. When I saw the interview on Swedish television, I felt I understood his experience and even concurred with his devastating assessment. I still do understand and concur, generally speaking, but I feel one specific exception should be noted: the historical Juan Matus. Yes, I do think that Carlos Castaneda, whom we may consider to have been a reasonably well-known anthropologist/philosopher, was one of those sailors on philosophy’s ship of fools; or to quote the author Joseph Heller: “he was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains.” But Castaneda, being the person he was, could not possibly have compiled “the lessons of don Juan” without actually having known and worked with a flesh-and-blood “man of knowledge” who, as many of Castaneda’s readers have at least subconsciously realised, was no fool at all.
The story “Carlos and the Indian Sorcerer” could be told simply and to-the-point by eliminating as much as possible of everything in the narrative that we may suspect was embellishment or even pure fabrication on the part of the author of the Teachings of Don Juan series of books:
Once upon a time, some 13.787 ± 0.020 x 10⁹ years after the birth of the Universe, an undergraduate student of anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, was conducting a field trip to the American states of Arizona and New Mexico. The name of this student was Carlos César Salvador Arana Castañeda. Carlos had been born and raised in South America, but he had emigrated to the United States of America at the age of twenty-six in order to seek a university education in this more affluent part of the world. The purpose of his field trip was to gather information about the uses of medicinal plants among Native Americans and, hopefully, to enlist some knowledgeable informant from the region to help him with his research. His special field of interest was the ceremonial use of the hallucinogenic cactus peyote (Lophophora williamsii). As luck would have it, his travelling companion on the field trip had the fortuitous opportunity of introducing Carlos to an indigenous Mexican yerbero (herbalist) by the name of Juan (Matus), who by reputation was an expert on the use of peyote.
Juan Matus’ curiosity was undoubtedly aroused by this chance meeting with an American university student, and he was very amused by Carlos’ awkward attempt at presenting himself as an authority on the use of peyote by the Indians. Carlos had said: “Perhaps we could get together sometime and talk about peyote,” and don Juan, miraculously stifling the guffaw he felt coming on, had replied: “Why not? You can come to my house when you get the opportunity, and then we can speak of this in a more relaxed manner.”
During the winter break at UCLA, six months after his initial and very brief interview with don Juan at the Greyhound bus terminal in Nogales, Arizona, Carlos took a flight to Hermosillo, Mexico, rented a car there, and “after making long and taxing inquiries among the local Indians” in the Valle del Yaqui, about 150 miles south of Hermosillo, he managed to find don Juan’s house, which was situated on the outskirts of a small station settlement along the Ferrocarril del Pacífico railway, about 10 miles north of the Yaqui town of Vícam. At the beginning of his first proper session of field work, Carlos confessed to don Juan that he had been very devious the first time they had met, boasting at the time that he knew a great deal about peyote, when in reality he knew next to nothing at all about it. He told don Juan that for six months he had been studying to prepare himself for their first session and that this time he knew much more than before. Don Juan made no attempt at stifling his laughter on this second occasion. “Excuse me,” he said, “but there is really nothing you could have done to prepare yourself for this meeting. As it happens, however, I like to walk. Would you like to take a short hike in the desert?”
Carlos had hoped that Juan Matus would make the ideal anthropological informant. For one thing, don Juan was almost seventy years old, and Carlos had been led to believe that “old people make the best informants because they are too feeble to do anything else except talk.” For another, don Juan was almost certainly uneducated, “a dumb Indian,” so to speak. Carlos, being a sophisticated university student, should undoubtedly be able to wrap don Juan around his finger in order to get the information he needed for his thesis.
As an anthropological informant, do Juan turned out to be much less than ideal. He was very self-assured, and probably because of this, he was verbally confident, almost in the extreme. In any battle of words between them, Carlos always found himself to be the intellectually disadvantaged one. Moreover, whenever Carlos broached the topic of peyote, don Juan would refuse to talk about it. “I didn’t realise that you want to actually take peyote. You must be insane! There is a deity residing in the peyote cactus, a deity called Mescalito. He is not to be trifled with. We Indians do not trifle with him. You’re not an Indian; you should definitely not trifle with him. In your present state of mind, and with your customary Caucasian attitude towards life, Mescalito would tear you to shreds. I wouldn’t like that on my conscience.” Inexplicably, at the end of every session don Juan would nonetheless encourage Carlos to return for another. “Come back,” he would say. “Be sure to come back.”
On Carlos’ third field trip to Sonora the following summer, don Juan unexpectedly relented on his refusal to seriously broach the topic of peyote:
As soon as I sat down, I bombarded don Juan with questions. He did not answer me and made an impatient gesture with his hand to be quiet. He seemed to be in a serious mood.
“I was thinking that you haven’t changed at all in the time you’ve been trying to learn about plants,” he said in an accusing tone.
He began reviewing in a loud voice all the changes of personality he had recommended I should undertake. I told him that I had considered the matter very seriously and found that I could not possibly fulfil them because each of them ran contrary to my core. He replied that to merely consider them was not enough, and that whatever he had said to me was not said just for fun. I again insisted that, although I had done very little in matters of adjusting my personal life to his ideas, I really wanted to learn the uses of plants.
After a long, uneasy silence I boldly asked him, “Would you teach me about peyote, don Juan?”
He said that my intentions alone were not enough, and that to know about Mescalito was a serious matter. It seemed that there was nothing else to say.
In the early evening, however, he set up a test for me; he put forth a problem without giving me any clues to its solution: to find a beneficial place or spot in the area right in front of his door where we always sat to talk, a spot where I could allegedly feel perfectly happy and invigorated. During the course of the night, while I attempted to find the “spot” by rolling on he ground, I twice detected a change of coloration on the uniformly dark dirt floor of the designated area.
The problem exhausted me and I fell asleep on one of the places where I had detected the change in color. In the morning don Juan woke me up and announced that I had had a very successful experience. [Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, pp. 70-71.]
On his fifth field trip to Sonora in August of that same summer, Carlos was afforded the opportunity of personally participating in the peyote ceremony:
As soon as I got out of my car, I complained to don Juan that I was not feeling well.
“Sit down, sit down,” he said softly and almost led me by the hand to his porch. He smiled and patted me on the back.
Two weeks before, on August 4th, don Juan, as he had said, changed his tactics with me and allowed me to ingest some peyote buttons. During the height of my hallucinatory experience, I played with a dog that lived in the house where the peyote session took place. Don Juan interpreted my interaction with the dog as a very special event. He contended that at moments of power, such as the one I had been living then, the world of ordinary affairs did not exist and nothing could be taken for granted, that the dog was not really a dog but the incarnation of Mescalito, the power or deity contained in peyote. [Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, p. 116.]
I complained again about the feeling of physical discomfort and the strange sense of unhappiness I was experiencing.
Don Juan laughed and said, “You’re beginning to learn.”
We then had a long conversation. He said that Mescalito, by allowing me to play with him, had pointed me out as a “chosen man” and that, although I was not an Indian, he was going to pass on to me some secret knowledge. He said that he had had a “benefactor” himself, who had taught him how to become a “man of knowledge.” [Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan, p. 117.]
Up to the point in time when don Juan arranged for Carlos to experience a personal confrontation with Mescalito, the deity he contended is inherent in the peyote cactus, we may assume that don Juan had mostly been amusing himself at Carlos’ expense by allowing, even encouraging, Carlos to make return visits to see him. Once Carlos had had a positive, in don Juan’s eyes very auspicious, hallucinatory experience under the influence of peyote, it would appear that don Juan had a change of attitude towards him, perhaps realising that Carlos could be the stepping stone towards a greater audience for his ideas, should he accept Carlos as his “chosen man.”
As far as Carlos is concerned, he does not seem to have intuited don Juan’s true motivations. For Carlos, don Juan was the Mexican Indian sorcerer who had presently taken him on as an apprentice. Of course he understood how fortunate he had been in finding don Juan. As an anthropological informant, don Juan was a one-in-a-million find. Carlos had read every academic paper that had ever been written concerning the ethnology of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. He knew he would now be in a position to write a thesis in anthropology to end all theses in anthropology.
Carlos continued to make his field trips to Mexico—four more in total, it would appear—in order to conduct further interviews with don Juan. During his ninth field trip, however, he became alarmingly aware of the heavy toll his training as a warrior was exacting on his mental health, and he decided to discontinue his attempt at becoming a “man of knowledge” according to the dictates of his mentor, Juan Matus. What he considered his “apprenticeship to a sorcerer” had only lasted about 18 months. Carlos returned to Los Angeles, his fieldwork obligation fulfilled, and thinking that it was high time to write his thesis for the complete fulfilment of the requirements for a degree of Master of Arts in anthropology. Five years later he submitted his thesis and was awarded his Master of Art degree. The thesis, entitled The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, was a shamefully fictionalized account of his field work with Juan Matus, in other words, a bogus thesis for an undeserved degree. Five more years later, Carlos submitted an equally bogus doctoral dissertation, entitled Sorcery: A Description of the World, and was subsequently awarded an equally undeserved PhD in anthropology.
My story of Carlos and the Indian sorcerer does end on a high note however; because no matter how flawed Carlos Castaneda’s personality appears to have been, he did actually meet and work with a very extraordinary person called don Juan, and it is by means of the books he wrote, partly factual but, unfortunately, mostly fictional, that we others have the opportunity to partake of the teachings of this don Juan. We thank you for that, Carlos.
Is it possible to condense the teachings of don Juan into a single sentence? Consider the following sentence: The path to transcendental knowledge is only open to those who have learned to stop the internal dialogue.
As it happens, ethnological research has shown that witches and healers among the indigenous people of the Americas have usually been, and possibly still are, individuals who have achieved the ability to purposely alter their normal state of consciousness into a trance state in order to gain the knowledge that is supposedly needed if one wishes to bewitch or to heal. This observation, however, does not necessarily suggest that only witches and healers can become what Castaneda’s don Juan would have called uno de los que saben (one of those who have attained wisdom).